Staff Sgt. Asbury "Freddie" Hawn II, a Tennessee National Guard soldier whose day job was on Nissan's factory line in Smyrna, was just 35 when he died in an ambush near Tikrit, Iraq, in 2005.

Nine years later, with American troops long gone, insurgents tied to al-Qaida have captured Tikrit and several other cities while advancing on Baghdad, the capital, where the government has mobilized untrained fighters to try to help Iraq's army repel the charge.

As Iraq plunges deeper into chaos, his wife says she hopes Hawn's sacrifice wasn't for nothing.

"There is a part of me who is relieved we're not putting boots on the ground, that air strikes are a possibility," Angie Hawn wrote in a text message on Monday. "Then there is the part of me that goes, don't let Freddie's death be in vain. Let's go get this done."

Nearly 4,500 Americans died in Iraq, including 97 from Tennessee, after the U.S. invaded in 2003. More than 40 Volunteer State residents were among the 2,300 Americans who have perished in Afghanistan since the U.S. went to war there after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to icasualties.org.

And more than 425 of the dead from both wars, whether they grew up here or elsewhere, were based at Fort Campbell, the Army post straddling the Kentucky-Tennessee border.

Brett Carter, a Nashville tax attorney who served in Iraq with the Army National Guard in 2004-05, said the nation's instability today has nothing to do with what he and so many other soldiers "laid out there." Carter, who ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Democrat four years ago, said he takes the long view on Iraq, now a fragile democracy.

"I don't really believe the true impact of what we did will be seen until years down the road. My commanders always said to think about it from a generational perspective. We weren't necessarily going to change things for the current generation, but the hope was that we were planting seeds for generations to come."

But Carter, who was at National Guard training in Mississippi on Monday, said he and many other soldiers do find the current chaos "disappointing but not surprising."

'A place where we've checked the box'

U.S. Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, who has been to Iraq four times, said the country already seemed to be "very much destabilizing" when he last visited in August. Corker, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in May that President Barack Obama's Democratic administration didn't seem to have the stomach to spend many resources there.

The administration "really wants to sweep these issues under the rug," Corker said. "After all the things many Tennesseans have done, with giving of life and limb, it feels like a place where we've checked the box."

On Monday, Corker said he supports American airstrikes to help the Iraqi army push back the insurgents if Iraq's government takes steps to improve the political situation there. He said the Obama administration also needs to force Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to "govern in a different way" and reach out to opposition groups, which he says have been emboldened by the lack of a coherent U.S. policy toward neighboring Syria.

"This has not been something that's snuck up on us," Corker said.

Obama didn't take the nation to war. He inherited the conflict from his predecessor, President George W. Bush, whose forces captured Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and laid the groundwork for democracy but struggled to secure the country.

Obama pulled the last American troops out of Iraq at the end of 2011. Iraq "was never Obama's war," said Tom Schwartz, a Vanderbilt University historian who specializes in U.S. foreign relations.

"He thought it was a stupid war, and he ended it," Schwartz said. "I understand the political reasoning there, but it's also a little short-sighted."

But the Iraqi government played a big part, too, said U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, the Nashville Democrat who has served on the House Armed Services Committee since 2003. Iraq refused to give the United States an extension of the Status of Forces Agreement, which called for U.S. forces to leave by Jan. 1, 2012.

"That was basically their request for us to leave the country," Cooper said.

Corker said Monday that while opinions vary on who's to blame, "the fact is, we didn't reach an agreement."

Katherine Carroll, a political science professor at Vanderbilt, served on a team of embedded social scientists who worked in Iraq in 2008-09, giving cultural and political advice to Army brigade commanders and soldiers in war zones. She said Obama's administration bowed to Maliki's insistence that the U.S. pull out its troops completely.

"We left too soon, and we didn't stay involved, and it was a huge mistake, in my opinion," she said.

Since then, Maliki has concentrated power to himself, Carroll and others said. Corker said he's told Maliki, who recently won a third term, that he needs to follow through on his ascent to power by delivering government services effectively and reaching out to Iraq's political minority.

The last phone call

It's impossible for most people to understand how attached Angie Hawn became to her cellphone while her husband fought in Iraq. Freddie Hawn II sprang for a satellite phone to take with him, and he'd step away to call his family when things were really going to hell.

For a year, his wife answered in the dead of night or in the movies — it didn't matter where she was.

"If you understood, you would not be shushing me," she would tell people.

The last time the phone rang, her husband's picture appearing on the screen, she was at Dollywood with their two sons, shouting "Hello? Hello?" into silence on the other end. It was Aug. 14, 2005.

Could be anything, she told herself. Don't worry. But that night, she couldn't help but watch the TV news: gunfire near Tikrit, three soldiers dead, one injured. And then the phone call from a sister-in-law back in Middle Tennessee, telling her to come home because the military chaplain had been by, but he wouldn't say anything without her there.

Nobody remembers much after that. Angie Hawn does recall being told that her husband was supposed to be in the gunner position on the second truck in a convoy assigned to check out a roadside bomb near Tikrit, but a mechanical malfunction and an absent fellow soldier put him inside the first car, vulnerable to enemy fire.

It's apparent Mapleview Cemetery in Smyrna, where Freddie Hawn is buried, lets families do what they want with the graves. Hawn's headstone is black with etchings of a full-color American flag, an eagle, a man on a four-wheeler rolling toward an eight-point buck. There's a concrete bench for visitors, who leave mementos when they come.

Hawn's wife and sons, John and Spencer, visit often, straightening the silk flowers and brushing off the bench. Angie has just started dating again, seeing a nice man who comes to church with her every Sunday and understands that, in a way, she'll always be married to Freddie Hawn.

There's a street named after him, Sgt. Asbury Hawn Way, in Smyrna. A bridge on State Route 840 is named for him, too. To this day, it's not unusual for the Hawns to be asked to speak for the families of soldiers killed in Iraq.

But she acknowledged that she has started paying more attention to questions about what was accomplished.

On the one big one — will the Iraq War go down in history as an American failure? — the experts don't offer much encouragement.

"I think it probably will," Schwartz said. "It's sort of like the argument over Vietnam, in the sense that the United States withdrew, and then two years later the North Vietnamese conquered. There will be plenty of blame to go around. I think most of it will fall on the Bush administration's lack of planning and other things at the beginning of the war.

"I tend to feel about historical judgments that you have to give a little bit more time. But right now, I wouldn't be in a very hopeful position, certainly compared to three years ago."

Corker said veterans who fought in Iraq are probably "incredibly despondent" over the situation, but he's not willing to give up on Iraq.

"The story's not fully written," he said. "The chapter that has been written over the last couple of years is not a good chapter. But it's my hope that for the men and women who sacrificed the way they did for so long, it's my hope that there will be a good outcome."